Clinton to Promote High Technology, With Gore in Charge

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IF the promises of the Clinton campaign for science and technology now come to pass, America is headed for a new era in which the Government's focus on making armaments will shift to fostering a host of new civilian technologies and industries. No financial midget, the civil initiative would spend money twice as fast as the Pentagon's Star Wars anti-missile program, one of the biggest research efforts of all time.

The aim, outlined in campaign documents and by advisers to President-elect Bill Clinton and Vice-President-elect Al Gore, is a new wave of research discoveries and applications that will flood the economy with innovative goods and services, lifting the general level of prosperity and strengthening American industry for the international trade wars of the 1990's and beyond.

"This is a watershed," Kent H. Hughes, president of the Council on Competitiveness, a private group based in Washington that advised the Clinton campaign, said in an interview. "We're now going to develop an economic strategy much in the way we developed a national security strategy to fight the cold war."

"It's a paradigm shift in terms of the Government's role in technology," said Erich Bloch, a distinguished fellow of the council who is a former director of the National Science Foundation, the top Federal agency for the support of general research.

As a peace dividend from the cold war's end, a minimum of $30 billion over four years is to be taken from the Pentagon's research budget and put into advanced work in areas like robotics, smart roads, biotechnology, machine tools, magnetic-levitation trains, fiber-optic communications and national computer networks. Also earmarked are a raft of basic technologies like digital imaging and data storage, which are increasingly seen as the underlying secret of lasting commercial success.

Significantly, the initiative would spend the same amount of money as Star Wars, $30 billion, in half the time.

But skeptics say the initiative is likely to backfire, bloating Congressional pork and creating whole new categories of Federal waste. They argue that Government officials generally lack the knowledge to predict which technologies will succeed in the marketplace and are never frugal with taxpayers' money, unlike entrepreneurs who risk their own. These defects, they say, make industrial policies all too prone to engender white elephants.

But advocates say past failures and painful lessons have increased the odds that the Clinton Administration will avoid such pitfalls to achieve a new kind of success. Most important, they say, business and government in this new era are to be partners, working together in an alliance that takes cognizance of market forces to produce a powerful new engine of technological advance.

The Clinton plan is outlined in an 18-page document, "Technology: The Engine of Economic Growth," issued Sept. 21 by Clinton-Gore campaign headquarters in Little Rock, Ark.

"America cannot continue to rely on trickle-down technology from the military," Mr. Clinton said in the document. "Civilian industry, not the military, is the driving force behind advanced technology today. Only by strengthening our civilian technology base can we solve the twin problems of national security and economic competitiveness." Air of Excitement

The plan has received little notice in the nation's general news outlets but has been widely read and applauded by the nation's technology experts, many of whom are now giddy with excitement. It is seen as the culmination of a slow shift in Federal priorities that has been grudgingly under way for several years, championed by the Democratic-led Congress but generally resisted by the Reagan and Bush Administrations.

A central question, these experts now say, is whether the Clinton plan can win the major financial backing it seeks.

"It's going to be a real push," said Dr. Roland W. Schmitt, president of Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, N.Y., a former head of corporate research for General Electric. "But the signs, I think, are very good that we may be embarked on a fundamental change."

Charles F. Larson, executive director of the Industrial Research Institute, a trade group in Washington, praised the plan but expressed doubt on its chances of being fully carried out.

"It's not going to be as easy to reduce the military budget as they think," he said. "There are going to be military tensions. Warfare is not over. We're looking forward to some positive changes in research funding, but with some skepticism as to whether they can pull off the whole plan."

Other experts said the Pentagon knows it ultimately has no choice but to go along with this type of initiative, since the technological strides needed for new weaponry are increasingly made by industry, and usually when unfettered by red tape and arcane Government regulations.

"It's in everybody's best interest," said Senator Jeff Bingaman, Democrat of New Mexico, who is chairman of the technology and national security subcommittee of the Congressional Joint Economic Committee and has pushed hard for Federal-industry research alliances.

The fate of the technology plan also will benefit from the fact that the Democrats now control both Congress and the White House, giving them great political leverage -- and accountability. "The Democrats know if there isn't quick movement in the right direction, they're going to get clobbered," said a Senate aide who is working on putting the Clinton-Gore technology plan into effect. Former Official Is Skeptical

One skeptic is Murray L. Weidenbaum, an economist at Washington University in St. Louis who advocated free-market mechanisms as chairman President Ronald Reagan's Council of Economic Advisers. In an interview, he said much of the money that did materialize would probably be squandered in pork-barrel projects meant to appease Congressional interests, not those of American industry.

"Judging from past performance," he said, "a lot of it will go for boondoggles."

For more than half a century, the Government's research policy in general has been to finance basic science heavily and trust that this will automatically lead to practical innovations and social betterment. Washington made little effort to translate discoveries about nature and nature's laws into devices and technologies, leaving that job to industry.

The exceptions to this policy mainly had to do with the military and aerospace, which were viewed as critical to fighting the cold war. The Government over the decades put trillions of dollars into building industries and doing research that could aid the development of new kinds of bombs, ships, guns, missiles, radars, aircraft and spy satellites.

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A few times Government went further to direct the development of purely civilian technologies. But its record was mixed, with as many failures as successes. Photovoltaic cells, which turn sunlight into electricity, are now entering the big time after decades of modest Government financing. But the $30 billion space shuttle program is still largely a technology in search of a mission. Synthetic fuels and the breeder reactor, which was to have made its own fuel, suffered similar fates.

The Reagan and Bush Administrations, awed by the power of laissez-faire economics and market forces, disdained Federal involvement in industry research, although the Bush Administration has recently softened its ideological opposition. And while economists are highly critical of so-called industrial policy, many policy makers now embrace it.

One reason for the reversal is the example set by Europe and Japan in using Government research to spur industrial innovation, the programs having had mixed success. Another reason is that in the American economy, the seemingly endless stream of military "spinoffs" that long buoyed the civil sector (computer chips, jet engines, communications satellites) are beginning to dry up. Instead, the military increasingly seeks to "spin in" advances from private industry, which in turn is rapidly falling behind foreign competitors.

Beginning in the mid-1980's, Democrats on Capitol Hill, fearing that America was losing its technical edge, began to fight for increased Federal money and attention for industrial renewal. Among the leaders were Senator Bingaman, Senator John Glenn of Ohio, Senator Ernest Hollings of South Carolina and Senator Gore of Tennessee.

For instance, they led a charge to pump billions of dollars into the Pentagon's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, and broadened its mandate to spurring many advanced technologies with both military and civilian uses, such as high-definition television, computer chips and fiber optics.

On another front, Senator Gore for years pushed hard for a national high-speed computer network that could link computers in Government, universities, industry and libraries. Last December his High-Performance Computing Act, which seeks to spend $2.9 billion over five years, was signed into law. Mr. Gore calls the network a "information superhighway" meant to be a catalyst to cultural and industrial progress.

In his September policy statement, Mr. Clinton said he would give Mr. Gore, the Vice-President-elect, "the responsibility and the authority to coordinate the Administration's vision for technology" and to lead all Government agencies and research groups in meeting the new goals. "This is a real job," Mr. Clinton emphasized, rejecting the ceremonial presumption for much Vice-Presidential work.

One of Mr. Gore's first tasks, Mr. Clinton said, will be to "create a forum for systematic private sector input into U.S. government deliberations about technology policy and competitiveness."

The Clinton technology plan itself, among other things, would spearhead research on advanced materials and industrial processes, would create 170 manufacturing extension centers around nation modeled on the highly successful agricultural ones and would redouble the push for information superhighways.

"Such a network," Mr. Clinton said, "could do for the productivity of individuals at their places of work and learning what the interstate highway of the 1950's did for the productivity of the nation's travel and distribution system."

The Clinton Administration, the plan says, "will view the support of generic industrial technologies as a priority mission." Shift to Civil Efforts

To this end, it proposes "at the very least" that 10 percent of the $76 billion that the Government now spends each year on research, or $7.6 billion, should be redirected from the Pentagon's research budget to civil efforts. Over four years this would add up to more than $30 billion.

This shift, the plan notes, would bring the Pentagon's share of the Federal research budget down to 50 percent from 60 percent. "Having achieved this balance," it says, "the Government should examine whether national security considerations and economic conditions warrant further shifts."

The plan would also direct the nation's 726 Federal laboratories, many of which were spawned by the cold war and do military work, to designate 10 to 20 percent of their existing budgets for joint ventures with industry.

The plan also lauds cooperative ventures like Sematech, an industry consortium that uses Federal and private funds to advance computer-chip manufacturing, and calls for similar ventures in other high-technology industries.

Advisers to the Clinton-Gore transition team say many details of the technology plan are only now being worked out, including whether to form new agencies, departments and initiatives or to work within existing Government structures. The leaning of the moment, said a Senate aide, is to create "nothing out of whole cloth." But Mr. Clinton himself, during the campaign, promised that he would create a civilian equivalent of Darpa to help encourage industrial innovation across the nation.

Senator Bingaman, who is helping to refine technology proposals for the new Administration, said a secret to avoiding the pitfalls of the past was to develop a new partnership with industry in which Federal funds would be matched with private ones, so market forces help shape and direct Federal largess and reduce the odds of technological waste. Sharing the Costs

"We'll sit down and say, 'What do you think is important?' and require them to spend their own money too," he said. "Cost sharing has to be a requirement."

Mr. Bloch of the Council on Competitiveness noted that many of the planned Clinton initiatives were expansions, albeit dramatic ones, of existing programs.

"It's not that the Bush Administration did nothing," he said. "But they did it reluctantly and there were ideological handicaps. The new Administration doesn't have those handicaps. That's a major change."

Correction: November 14, 1992

An article in Science Times on Tuesday about Bill Clinton's probable policy toward science and technology misstated the time he said it would take to move $7.6 billion in annual Federal spending on scientific research from military to civil projects. He said the move would occur gradually, taking three years to reach $7.6 billion; thus, the total funds shifted over four years would be somewhat less than $30 billion.

A version of this article appears in print on November 10, 1992, on Page C00001 of the National edition with the headline: Clinton to Promote High Technology, With Gore in Charge. Order Reprints|Today's Paper|Subscribe